A Shroud for Aquarius

18

Jill wore a white bikini that was startling against her brown skin; so was her bright red lipstick. The short punky cut of her black hair gave her beauty a nicely casual quality. She was stretched out on her back on a lounge chair, letting the hundred-degree Nevada sun — almost directly over us — beat down on her. Tiny beads of sweat pearled her body. Sunglasses with sweeping pink fifties-style frames shielded her eyes. Occasionally she sipped a tall cool fruity drink, the kind with an umbrella in it. I was sitting nearby, on the edge of the pool, feet dangling in the cool water. Cool compared to the climate, that is. Half turning to look at her, I realized she was the most beautiful woman here, and there were plenty of younger, fleshier bikinied beauties around the pool atop the Four Kings, showgirls some of them, actresses, stewardesses, what-have-you. But to my eyes Jill Forest, thirty-three, of Port City, Iowa, topped them all.

I withdrew my legs from the pool and walked over next to her and sat on a towel, heat from cement coming right through and scalding my ass. I didn’t care. I wanted to talk to Jill.

“Have you ever been married?” I asked her.

A faint smile flickered over a face (a flawless face, actually, but that would be one too many f’s) that might otherwise have belonged to a sleeping beauty.

“Took you long enough to ask that question,” she said, red lips barely moving, upper lip moist with bodily dew.

“Maybe I was afraid to ask.”

“Have you been married, Mal?”

“You know I haven’t.”

“Ever lived with anybody?”

“A couple times, when I was much younger.”

“Funny.”

“What’s funny?”

An expression I couldn’t read flitted across her face before her features settled into that expressionless tanning look. “You don’t seem the confirmed bachelor type.”

“Sometimes bachelors my age are assumed to be gay, you know.”

She lifted a hand to the sunglasses, lowered them to peer at me archly for a moment. “You’re not gay.” Put the pink frames back in place.

“Glad you noticed.”

Despite that show of confidence, the truth was we hadn’t made love last night. It was one something A.M. when we finished talking to Charlie Stone, and we walked Glitter Gulch awhile, peeking in here and there, and then hired a cab to take us up the Strip, finally got out and walked some of that, taking in the neon and the kitschy decadence. Not a word was said about Ginnie the whole time. It was almost four when we finally drifted up to our hotel room, and tumbled into bed like dice and crapped out.

Then, when the sun sliced through the place where the drapes hadn’t been closed all the way, I roused, aroused, drowsily rolled over and up against something or somebody and suddenly more or less realized a beautiful woman was in bed with me. Half asleep, not knowing who this woman was exactly, not remembering who I was exactly, I began cuddling, bumping, generally making trouble, and the beautiful woman responded, seeming pleasantly surprised to find a man in her bed, and, tangled in blankets and sheets, the musky smell of slumber on us both, we made love in that sweet, spontaneous, half-asleep, am-I-dreaming, quite wonderful way, and fell back asleep again, in each other’s arms this time.

But we were up and about by nine-thirty, despite the late night before, and found a breakfast buffet and (taking Charlie Stone up on yet another offer of kindness) signed for our food, so that it would be attached to a bill we weren’t being asked to pay.

We’d spent the rest of the morning around the pool; we’d both been in swimming, but mostly she sunned, I swam and (I suspect) we both stewed.

Because we hadn’t yet mentioned Ginnie Mullens, or Charlie Stone’s disclosures about her.

“Well?” I asked.

“Well what?” she replied, barely moving her lips.

“Have you ever been married?”

She took the sunglasses off, turned her head, looked right at me. The cornflower blue eyes in that dark face were a continual surprise. She shook her head ever so slightly, lovely face expressionless, and said, “No.”

Then, just another shrewd Vegas gambler waiting for the other guy to make his mistake, she left the sunglasses off, looked at me; smiled a tiny, tiny smile, daring my response.

Which was, “Why not?”

“Because you broke my heart when I was a child.” She said this straight-faced, with just a hint of humor.

“Oh, I did, did I?”

“You most certainly did.”

“So, then, you probably never ever lived with anybody, either?”

Smiling more openly, she turned her head skyward, putting the sunglasses back on.

“Sure I did,” she said. “Several times, over the years.”

“This, after I broke your heart?”

Now her smile was wicked. “I’m a fast healer.”

“Why didn’t you marry any of the guys?”

The smile faded. “It just wasn’t... right.”

“As in ‘Mr. Right’?”

She looked over at me; my reflection was in her sunglasses — my hair was wet from swimming, I noticed. “If,” she said, “you’re implying I’ve been waiting for you, Mr. Mallory, lo these many years, then your ego is even sicker than I think it is.”

I didn’t want to banter anymore; the tone of what I said next established that.

“Look,” I said. “We’re both the same age... well, I’m a little older. And I just wondered if...” I tried to think of a way to say this without insulting her; the best way seemed to be to leave her out of it, and stick to me. “... I wonder sometimes if life isn’t slipping through my fingers. I’m at, or nearing, the probable halfway point of my life... assuming a truck or, as we say in Las Vegas, the ‘big casino’ or something doesn’t knock me down first. And what do I have to show for my years on this planet?”

“You’ve written books,” she offered.

“I’ve accomplished some things, I’ll grant you. But I’ve been selfish. I spent my youth bumming around, doing this, doing that, building experience as a pool from which to write my stories. Fine — now I’m writing them and getting paid for the privilege, I’ve come up in the world, I have a house, a car, and the mortgage and payments that go with it. I’ve arrived. But where am I?”

“In the midst of the American dream, I’d say.”

“Yeah, and sometimes I wish I could wake up. I’m like so many of my generation — all of us baby boomers, us selfish brats who were going to change the world and didn’t. Haven’t I ended up with the same values, the same materialistic trappings as my parents? Do you ever feel that way? Has that ever occurred to you?”

“Yes,” she said.

“But our parents had something we don’t, you and I. They had each other. They had a family. Have you ever had a child, Jill?”

She could’ve taken offense, but she didn’t. “No,” she said.

“Our generation put that off, you know. Women are waiting till they’re in their late thirties now before having a kid, if at all. Careers. Self. That’s us. But where’s next year’s model going to come from, Jill?”

“Are you... asking me to...?”

“No. I’m not asking you to marry me, not yet anyway. I’m not even suggesting we live together. Not yet. But I want to go on record: if we’re going to build some kind of... relationship — and Christ how I hate that word — I want it to be for real. I can’t handle any more one-night stands, and if I ever find myself in a singles bar again I may climb a tower with a rifle and start shooting.”

She was sitting on the edge of the lounge chair now. “What brought this on?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do,” she said wisely. “And so do I.”

“Ginnie, I guess,” I admitted reluctantly.

“Ginnie. Talented, brilliant, funny, pretty Ginnie. Gone. A life wasted.”

“It wasn’t a waste,” I said. “There were good things in her life. And she left a sweet little child behind her, and that’s something anyway.”

Jill looked toward the shallow end of the pool where an attractive blonde mommy ten years younger than either of us romped with her three-year-old. “I’ve felt these things you’re feeling, Mal. Maybe I’ve felt them more sharply than you. You don’t have a biological clock ticking away in your tummy, do you? I’m thirty-three and if I want to have any children, maybe I better get cracking.”

“Do you want to have children?”

“For a long, long time, I didn’t think I did. These last couple years... I’m not so sure.” She looked at me, studying me, then bent down and gave me a kiss; not a sexy kiss, but a very affectionate one. “Let’s not be a one-night stand, Mal. Or a two-night or anything less than giving ourselves a real chance.”

“Agreed.”

We shook hands.

My watch was on a towel on the other side of her; I asked her to check the time.

“Half-past noon,” she said.

“We don’t have to leave for the airport till four. Plenty of time to do some things. We could do some sight-seeing, some shopping...”

“How about a few hours in our hotel room?” The wicked smile again.

“I could be talked into that,” I said, my smile a little on the wicked side itself.

“Unless you’d rather gamble...”

“Coming here was all the gamble I care to take.”

“It paid off, didn’t it?”

“Yes,” I granted, “but I can’t make sense out of what I’ve learned; not yet, anyway.”

“You’re thinking that Ginnie is starting to look like a real suicide.”

I rubbed some sweat off my forehead; sighed. “She sure seems to’ve been at the end of her string. Her personal relationships were a shambles. ETC.’s had been pulled out from under her. You know, I asked her at the reunion how business was, and she said ‘good’ — but that was after the ETC.’s sale. Her only business at that point was dope. She was really at a dead end... the only thing she still had going for her was playing mule for Sturms — and there could hardly have been much satisfaction in that for someone of Ginnie’s abilities and ambitions.”

“What about her recent obsession with the past?” Jill said. “She talked to me about the ‘good old days’ for hours. Then she came back to Port City for that reunion, looked up her old boyfriend, tried to get something going with him, fifteen years later.”

“A pretty desperate move,” I said. “Hardly rational, considering how little she and Faulkner had in common at this point.”

“Maybe she wasn’t finding any answers in the present, and hoped to find them in the past.”

A teenage boy and girl were splashing in the deep end nearby, making happy noise.

“Maybe,” I nodded. “At the reunion she was talking about her old goal of making a million by the time she was thirty — she was a few years past thirty, but hadn’t given up the goal. She just ‘adjusted’ it.”

“That’s why she came here,” Jill said, meaning Las Vegas. “To go for broke. A last ditch effort—”

“Make a quick kill,” I agreed.

“Sad.” Jill shook her head, black hair tumbling; put her towel around her shoulders. “To take all she had and throw the dice. All that money from selling the business she’d built up with years of hard work — a roll of the dice, and gone.”

“That’s what bothers me most,” I said.

“What?”

“She got $100,000 out of the ETC.’s sellout, right?”

“Yes...”

“Well, Charlie Stone said she lost $250,000 at the craps table.”

She touched fingertips to lipsticked lips. “I hadn’t thought of that—”

“Exactly. Where’d she get the other $150,000?”